Dan Russell: Well, there is the commercial motivation there. The attempt to criminalize drugs was part and parcel with the attempt to criminalize alcohol, or vice-verse. It was the same individuals and groups, the WCTU, the Anti-Saloon League, pushing the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act. It was the same legislators pushing the same things at the same time.

Harrison was passed in 1914. What became the 18th Amendment, Alcohol Prohibition, in 1918, was first proposed in Congress in 1911. The same guy who proposed the 18th Amendment was later the great anti-heroin crusader, Richmond P. Hobson. Harvey Wiley too, chief chemist at the USDA, demonized alcohol, and became a great anti-drug crusader leading the fight to pass Harrison.

So, what you had was the same medical monopoly, combining with the same industrialists, to criminalize working folks for taking pain-killers, at the same time working to monopolize effective pain-killers.

You had organized medicine working with organized industry to engineer this whole bevy of laws. There was no distinction politically between alcohol prohibition and drug prohibition. What happened was they were dealing with a culture that was essentially European, for whom alcohol is essentially socially sacramental, so Prohibition was political suicide.

What the Prohibitionists found they'd done was in fact empower organized crime, and the facist power structure around the monopoly on the alcohol trade.

It became politically impossible, but what really ended Prohibition was the Great Depression. You had this massive political revolt that ended up in a liberal administration after a long series of Republican administrations. What you had eventually was the re-establishment of the alcohol industry and its incorporation into American culture.

Now, marijuana has become as culturally accepted as alcohol was during Prohibition, from the 1960s onwards. What happened was this great cultural revolution where marijuana was definitely the sacrament of the 60s, and my generation.

So, we have the beginnings of a legalization movement that is pretty powerful and continues to make gains, because marijuana is culturally acceptable. What these people are talking about when they talk about cultural war is sacramental, and there is an element of this, the violently anti-sacramental Protestantism, which does not remember the Sacremental nature of religion as even the Catholics do.

Protestantism is a 16th Century Germanic religion, essentially an industrial religion that glorifies the assembly line, and industrial servitude. It is profoundly anti-sacramental, and is completely disconnected from roots in the ancient world.

Now we have this culture lead by Protestant industrialists who are trying to force their anti-sacramental views on the world, as a method of industrial enslavement. So what we have is a situation where they say, "not only do we own your time when we are paying your wages, but we own the time when we're not paying your wages."